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Re: Anyone using hierarchical RL for combined locomotion and manipulation?
Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2026 11:59 am
by hill23
I'd push back on this a bit.
Physical Intelligence's pi0 pairs a smaller pretrained vision-language backbone with a separate flow-matching 'action expert' module, which is one way to get fast, high-frequency action output without needing the whole giant language model to run at control-loop speed.
Re: Anyone using hierarchical RL for combined locomotion and manipulation?
Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2026 11:59 am
by lbianchi
I can speak to this a bit.
A lot of what reads as 'full autonomy' in public demos is closer to a mix of scripted state machines, teleoperation for the hardest sub-tasks, and autonomous execution for the easier, well-rehearsed parts - transparency about this mix varies a lot between companies.
Re: Anyone using hierarchical RL for combined locomotion and manipulation?
Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2026 11:59 am
by mary.taylor6
@lbianchi This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for.
'Zero-shot sim-to-real' rarely means literally zero real-world tuning in practice - it usually means the policy transfers well enough to be usable with only calibration and minor safety-limit adjustments, rather than needing a full additional training phase on hardware.